The ways of the Almighty...

There is a popular line in drama in my mother tongue (Bengali, that is) which goes as "Kotha bolo na; tomra keu shobdo koro na, bhogobaan nidra giyechhen golojog shoite paren na; kotha bolo na!" Translated to English, that stands as "Dont talk, dont make a noise, the Almighty is asleep, and he cannot stand being disturbed, so keep quiet". Every time I hear this line, I feel something very queer, which is perhaps not noticeable in the lines in a hurried read.

The surprise element lies in the statement that the Almighty is asleep. Think about it. Someone whom we visualize as our guardian above, who watches over us, protecting us from harm, noting our deeds and punishing or rewarding us accordingly at the end of our mortal lives (at least so says mythology, of almost any religion) is asleep. ASLEEP. HE is not watching over you. HE does not care about who is doing what, the good the bad and the ugly. Is HE at all interested?

Its a philosophical thought, but it brings to my mind the question "what if?" What if all that we were taught was wrong? What if values, virtues and the fabled "triumph of good" do not exist in reality? What if the good do not get rewarded in any way and die miserably, and the bad who manage their way all the way up are the ones who end up with everything they want in life? What if there is no grand record book of earthly doings? Worse still, what if the judging criteria of a man or woman on earth is not what we imagine it to be? What if it is exactly reverse?

What about the old guy who lives down your street? The poor man spent his life working hard at the local post office. Little did he earn, but spent it unflinchingly to educate his son. Great was his joy on the day when his son finished school. Unbounded was his pride when his son studied in a good college by a scholarship. He held hands with his elderly wife, sitting at the park bench, sighing at having successfully raised a family and served his nation, waiting for his son to come to him with visions of a better life.

The wait never ended. His wife perhaps realized its no good waiting, she quietly passed away one day. Heartbreaking it was, yet an occasion with a silver lining, for on this excuse his son did come home for a week. But then it was all gone, and the shroud of loneliness descended upon him. He waits still, but suspects that his wife knew better, and hopes that one night he too will pass away in his sleep, unnoticed to the rest of the world.

And then relatives will come and say "He was a good man. God rewarded him, he passed away painlessly." Painless, was it? Was that all the reward he deserved? Oh the folly! But the topic changes soon, to more important things like inheritance.

In a Bengali movie called "Kori diye kinlam" (among the better ones) there is a silly old man, who says two lines of great wisdom. When a girl about to be married asks him "Will I be happy in life?" he says "Oh you silly girl, dont you know? In this world he who is rich is happy". And when the girl asks him about punishment after death, he vehemently protests "There is nothing after death. Nothing. With death its finished. Its all gone, dark and hollow". Remarkable. Why have people not thought about this in greater detail?

There is a little girl at the corner of street where I turn. In ragged clothes and dirty hair she scrubs away at the cups and plates piled high and deep at her feet. She works fast, because her angry employer shouts at her when she does not. But in her heart she knows another reason. Everyday when she finishes her work, she gets a dry biscuit from the owner of the ramshackle dhaba. She tries to time this precisely at the hour when her 3-and-a-half foot high hero comes with a holder full of tea glasses. If she succeeds, she manages to share the biscuit with the urchin, who in turn manages one extra cup of tea everyday for this little intimate brunch. The owner looks suspiciously at the pair, and seems to be in an unusual hurry to close shop and go home. She hates it, the moment of separation.

God's children, aren't they? Well they'd better be, for there is nobody else alive who would call them their children. And what is the fate of God's children? Somewhere below the wheels of a car? Or are they to succeed the beggar a little further down? Who keeps note of their tender feelings, and where will those take them?

Don't seethe your temper against the owner of the shop. He does not earn much himself. Has an ailing wife, and a promiscuous daughter who ran away from home for ... He shivers at the thought. God knows where she is now. His wife weeps every night secretly for her. He weeps every night thinking of all the money he owes the street ruffians who threaten him in different ways every week. They are backed by the police, who share in the earnings. Its no good fighting crocodiles in water, so he tries to accommodate. And when bereft of all hope he stumbles along the lanes of the red-light area dead drunk shouting out the name of his daughter, not knowing whether to be happy or sad at the lean prospect of a reply from one of the windows above, a little feeling stretches out for the pair of urchins back at his shop. He'll scold the girl even more the next day, he tells himself. Maybe that way she wont lose discipline like his daughter did. And he'll keep the boy away from her, this is where it all begins. But maybe, just maybe, he'll get her a bigger biscuit.

And in contrast we have God's privileged child. The symbol of Hinduism. The god of the state. He who brings great investments and great industrialization. He who, not so long ago, was charged of inactivity, or rather instigating activities between 27th to 3rd February of 2002. He who was, possibly, indirectly responsible for the death of almost a thousand innocent people, orphaning of children, rape of women and numerous such atrocities. He who was accused of having systematically planned government and security level inaction against a terrible carnage. Numerous aging parents like the one who recently passed away down the street have been pushed to wait forever for their children to return by him. Countless little girls and tea-carrying urchins have been purportedly produced by him, who loiter the streets with no place to call home, and nobody to call dear. Perhaps even today, the graying hairs and the wrinkled brows of some father like my dear dhabawala try hard to conceal the screams of imputation to the Almighty against him, only to break down in the comfortable numbness of inebriation.

But is HE listening? His ideal demagogue came through clean. Of course he did, the Government found nothing wrong. They even got him a better rank and position. And I am quite sure, after death, if he stands before HIS court, he'll come clean there too. "Pichhpaa noy bidhatao dudhete jol meshate" we say in Bengali - Even HE does not hesitate to mix water in milk. HE could with with a little more money and power HIMSELF.

Maybe in the Christian schools when the kids line up in the morning for their prayers, they should just say:

Dear God,

Are you watching?

Amen.

Ijj aal well?

Close your eyes. Visualize your high school days. Remember the tutions, the homework and they late night studying. Now gently, whisper ... IIT

IIT. Dreams. Aspirations. Thrill. Enthusiasm. Thirst for knowledge, the strife for perfection and the leap of achievement.

And four years down the line, the adjectives change deceptively. Disillusionment. Dissatisfaction. Frustration. Aversion to books, antagonistic towards labs, antipathy to education and the anathema that is college life. What went wrong? What indeed went so wrong in so short a time?

Being on the student side of the stile of educational hierarchy, I have a tendency to speak for those among whom I stand. Granted, we are no less. IIT'ians and rockets are known to work only when their a**es are on fire. We don't study, we plagiarize projects, bunk classes even at high noon and sleep through labs. Surely there could not have been a more unruly and indisciplined lot than us. We are the paragon of bohemianism, irreverence personified and the epitomes of inconsistency.

But did they expect anything else? When they hand-picked 5000 of India's 5-lakh strong high-school population, did they expect us to be "normal"? Would an 18 year old boy prefer to go to a class or to the nearest fast food joint? Would a 19 year old girl prefer to measure titre values or watch the sunset hand-in-hand with her boyfriend? Would a young innovator rather slog over bookish formulae after a tiresome night of trying to perfect his automated door-lock than sleep?

Why were we expected to be so conventional after the selection procedure so meticulously filtered out only the mavericks?

Well, we were ready to go through that too. If I remember correctly, not a SINGLE student had bunked any class on the first day he came to IIT. Nobody had failed to try his/her level best to blaze through the first mid-semester examination at IIT. Nobody had manipulated lab results the first day they tried their hands at something in the lab. We were ready. Ready to give our best shot. Our most sincere hard work.

But they destroyed that too. They were so bad at what they were supposed to do, that within a matter of a couple of weeks they convinced people it was not worthwhile going to classes. They lost the most dedicated and sincere audience they could ever have by their extravagantly limpid demonstration of the fact that they themselves did NOT LOVE what they were doing, and that they were MISERABLE with their own lives. They made it clear that the objective of engineering was to write and solve equations, often without bothering about what they really meant or how they could be put to some practical use. They impressed upon us that lab experiments HAD TO give the same results that they expected, because they were not smart enough to explain what went wrong. Your answers had to be what "pleased" their aesthetic sense, else it was wrong. And when little boys and girls wept behind closed doors in their rooms after the mid-semester massacre, nobody came to tell them that there was always a second time. Or a third or fourth. The judgement had been taken. In a matter of 2 months, you went from being an IITian to a nobody. And the tag stuck on. It just went on, education for the sake of filling your notebooks.

The poison thus insinuated spread like wild conflagration. The smartest minds of the nation broke down under the curse of neglect, misjudgment and plebeian channelization. Friends rifted into "nerds" and "dudes" (which was primarily anchored around your CPI). The hurt sentiments of snuffed out hope resorted to extra academics, more often to feel the recognition, sense of achievement and success which they had been deprived of, than for the true love of it. But being exceptionally brilliant, they excelled at that too. They became extraordinary sportsmen, singers, artists and dramatists, or revived the talents admonished at home and long forgotten under the onerous piles of notes that symbolizes education today. They organized the best known fests in Asia and made the whole continent shake up and take notice of IIT for reasons people really had not expected in the first place.

Surprisingly, they did not like it. They never joined in the merriment, although they were certainly not THAT old. When boys and girls shook their legs on the dance floor, they arched their eyebrows and questioned their moral standards. When youngsters ran away from mess food they barricaded the gates to tie them in. When boys turned in late for class after having spent hours trying to organize the same events for which they boasted to their peers elsewhere, they rudely turned them out for indiscipline. When students enthusiastically displayed working models, they asked for theory, and when students worked out new principles, they asked for application. The amusement went a step further when the same people who quarreled with their families every evening at home attempted to counsel those whose minds had not been clouded by age. And all their noble motives suddenly vaporized into thin air when a student died from lack of timely medical attention.

And at the end of it all, when the thoroughly demotivated and frustrated population took up jobs in finance, went to management schools and to foreign universities hoping for a more intellectually stimulating environment, they put up another laughable show of ironic chicanery. To the new entrants, they showed placement statistics - they are lucrative figures anyway. To the government and newspapers, they fretted about the lack of technical bent in the minds of the youth and the brazen craze for wealth. And to the parents, they wondered why people are in such a hurry to leave the country for good. Only deep within they knew that there was only one answer to it all, a finger pointing back at themselves.

Why was this done to us? We had come here, honestly, to learn, and to make India proud. We were methodically subdued and demoralized and discouraged in every way possible. Why were we cheated and deprived? Why was our creativity nipped in the bud? Why were the erudite forced to reduce themselves to the pedestrian?

And when next time I hear a grandiloquent speech describing how we are wasting our parent's and the taxpayer's money, how ignorant we are and how hopelessly inadequate our knowledge is compared to those who strive to maintain the "sanctity of IIT", I wish to stand up and say "You may be a great man, and I may know nothing. But I have a right to live and be happy. You have already robbed me of too much, don't you dare take this away from me too."